Recent posts by Xiaoma on Kongregate

Looks like about $50… for a 10 year old OS! Kind of crazy to think about considering Mountain Lion was only $20!

I’m thinking I may save flash development for those times when I’ve got my old compasaurus set up and just do Javascript-based facebook apps on my Mac. It’s close enough that if I did ever want to convert it to AS3 it wouldn’t be too touch. I’m not sure how their ad monetization compares but the virtual goods seem pretty similar.

Thanks for the feedback all, and that looks like a useful tutorial, DrYoshi. I guess I’ll start with working on a way to generate the random map (in such a way that continents emerge). Also, I like your idea Qwerber. It really intrigues me… what if you could make nothing but orcs (or zombies or whatever)? It would still leave the hard parts of the problem, but strip away all the distractions!

Hi all! A couple of years ago, I went through the shootorials, enjoyed them and then re-wrote the game in AS3, with added bosses, powerups and wingmen fighters.

Then, I made a breakout clone (you can see it under my games). The collision detection took a lot of work, but I enjoyed learning how to make tiled backgrounds, etc. The game was totally playable but obviously not too original and got poor ratings.

After that, I went back to the drawing board and tried to think of a slightly tougher kind of game and came up with tetris. I didn’t want to do a straight 80’s game clone though, so I went for a game I’d always wanted as a kid — tetris with a shop where you can buy and sell shapes between levels! At first I got pretty bogged down with calculating what went where, until I had the idea of abstracting a grid function came upon me (see my blog: http://logicmason.com/2011/01/).

All in all, that game, Block Merchant, took me a few hours a day for over a month. The feedback on kongregate was scathing! It was too hard, and probably just original enough that it made people want something truly original. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/Xiaoma/block-merchant)

It’s been some time off of game programming, but I still love games and want to do another and I’m looking for a next step. One of my favorite game types is the 4X — eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. I used to play a TON of Civ and other Microprose games as a kid!

How realistic is this project? Can anyone recommend resources for how to handle map generation, path-finding and AI?

If you have another suggestion for a game between the difficulties of tetris and Civ, I’d love to hear that, too.

Anyway, I’ve just released my code for my first game I did based on them. It’s all in AS3, which might be a help for anyone who has only gone through the shootorial and is still using AS2. Also I’ve added some more powerups, new tower bosses and wingmen. Hopefully this is helpful to someone!

I agree with several things pointed out in this thread. For one, the amount of enjoyment offered for the amount of money asked is an excellent deal compared to movies, books or most other kinds of entertainment. Nothing is wrong with the pricing. I also have no problem with offering free demos for bigger games or charging to unlock more content in an RPG, a platformer or another story-based game.

The problem is when money influences the high score list, or even worse the outcome of a competitive game. One of the primary things that can make a game enjoyable is the experience of mastering some skill, whether it be based on timing, reflexes or strategy. Many times, measuring oneself against others is a great way to benchmark one’s progress. Some people also really love a good competition. By bringing money into the equation this entire process is warped, and gamers are rightfully unhappy.

Would you enjoy basketball games in which one team could simply pay for a larger hoop to shoot at? How about Street Fighter or Tekken in which the player who paid more did more damage with each attack? Surely it’s not that hard to see how premium versions of games, especially multiplayer games, are pissing people off.

With Gemcraft, the solution is simple. Just have separate high scores lists for people who have paid for the premium version. They’ll have more content (which is a good bargain by any measure), but they won’t be “buying” a high score.

Yes, 小馬 is right, qwerber! Thanks for the feedback. Could you maybe be a little bit more specific about the interface? One person suggested adding an alternative mouse-based interface for the shop. What would you change?

Hello, all! A month ago, I released my third flash game here. It’s line clearing game in the style of tetris, but its not limited to “tetrominoes”. It includes three, five, six and seven component pieces as well as the four piece ones found in tetris. Its primary feature is a shop, where you can purchase new blocks or pay to have bad ones removed from your inventory.

When I released the game, it was too hard and the interface had some serious shortcomings. I found the feedback from the early players very helpful and I’ve implemented some of their suggestions. The game is far better than it was originally (though still clearly a novice production).

If anyone has any suggestions on how to further improve it or even comments about what’s wrong with it, I’d be very appreciative.

Node Towers- A node tower’s attack is speed 3 (about halfway between a squirt and a normal), and it does low damage. But when you have more than one touching, the damage of each is multiplied by the number of towers chained together. For example, if you had six of them together in a chain, they’d each do 6x the normal damage and together they’d do 36 times what a single tower could do, assuming they could all hit the creep. This would be a poor tower early on, but potentially the strongest if you could get enough of them chained up.

Corrosion Towers – A corrosion tower is similar to a frost tower, except that they lower the armor of an enemy instead of slowing it. A level one corrosion tower would cause all creeps it hits to take 2 extra damage from each shot for x amount of time. Higher level towers would cause creeps to take far more damage. These towers would be good to place next to either rapid firing towers or towers that hit many creeps at once.

Rail Towers – A rail tower shoots in a direct line towards the closest enemy. Regardless of how far that enemy is, the shot will continue in a straight line damaging every enemy in its path until it leaves the screen. These towers are useful at the ends of long, straight corridors.

I’ve imported a bitmap named “background1.bmp” into my library, converted it to an object named “bg1” and set it to export to actionscript3 with the same class name.

When selecting something from the library and converting it to a symbol, a pop-up window comes up. I clicked in the export for ActionScript box, and here are the properties of the symbol, all of which I left at default:

I really haven’t changed anything away from defaults. All I’ve done is import a bmp into the library, convert it to a symbol and click the export for ActionScript check box. I’ve tried copying and pasting each code example I’ve seen here and double checked it. I really appreciate the attempts to help, despite the fact that I haven’t been able to get it working. It’s hard to believe it’s so hard to get flash to do something so simple!

Anyway, the brute force, double for-loop works and I guess I can just roll my own tiled backgrounds. If anybody has a working example (that they’ve compiled, not just found online), I’d still like to learn how it’s done, though.

parallactic_, I tried your AS3 code in my class and got this error: “Access of undefined property graphics.” Then I tried it inside a function and got “Implicit coercion of a value of type Class to an unrelated type flash.display:BitmapData”

Does that mean I need to import something?

Poskusin, It worked! I guess the brute force way is okay sometimes. PS How do I make sure it ends up in my background layer instead of on top of my sprites?

How do you make a tiled background from a bmp? I’m using CS5, I’ve imported a bitmap named “background1.bmp” into my library, converted it to an object named “bg1” and set it to export to actionscript3 with the same class name.

What do I need to do to fill a background with this image tiled over and over? It’s simple to do in HTML, but nothing I’ve found googling for this answer has worked.

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